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You might be wondering what’s going on at Templatic? We were on a good momentum with continuous, useful product releases and then kinda stopped with the release of SpotFinder. What is happening? Well, this blog post is essentially a big update on what is going on at Templatic right now.

A few months ago we started working on several improvements in our flagship product – Directory. One thing led to another and suddenly we realized that these changes don’t belong in a run of the mil update. With that in mind we set our path for the 2nd version of the product.

Yes, Directory 2.0 is on the way!

In case you haven’t noticed, Templatic.com now sports a shiny cart that allows you to checkout with more than one product at a time. To celebrate this we’re organizing a short 24 hour offer. Starting today and ending tomorrow you can get a bonus product on everything you purchase! The offer is valid for both single-product purchases (themes & plugins) and also our Club membership!

How to grab the deal?

Just click on “Add to cart” for the product you want and open the cart. A special dropdown menu will appear inside the cart offer allowing you to specify which bonus product you want. You’re allowed to combine themes and plugins. In other words, if you’re checking out with Directory, feel free to choose any of the available add-ons as the bonus product.

If you’ll have any questions about the offer or a specific product feel free to use the comments section below. If you prefer to ask us stuff privately, just use the contact form.

Ever since the original GeoPlaces and then Directory theme was released, the industry has adapted the trend set by templatic for listings kind of themes. Map at the top, listings at the bottom. It was great back then in 2011 when wide, big screens were not adapted yet. Things has changed and now we rarely see those 17″ screens being used. Screen space on both the side goes wasted while you are presented the content at the center of your screen.

Today we are excited to break this trend and offer a perfect solution needed today for directory sites. Announcing 8th Directory child theme – SpotFinder. SpotFinder is continuing the trend of reimagining Directory with new and unique child themes. It’s inspired by the new Airbnb website and thus comes with some really big design changes when compared to the parent theme.

Today is India’s Independence Day so we wanted to celebrate it with you guys. Over the last few months we’ve released a number of new add-ons so it’s fitting to have this deal be all about them. For every Directory add-on purchase you get another one totally free! The deal ends on August 22nd, 2014.

Over the last couple of months we’ve released a number of new add-ons for Directory, but it’s been a while since we announced new payment gateways. Dwolla and PayPal Express Checkout are the latest additions! After enabling these add-ons your visitors will be able to use them to pay for price packages. Of course, you will need a merchant account with each before getting started.

With more and more people customizing Directory I figured it was time to create a proper article which outlines the best way to tweak CSS and PHP in Directory. My initial plan was to release it as a blog post, but the size of the article got out of hand so it had to be moved over the Docs site.

In short, the best way to customize Directory is to utilize either a child theme or a plugin. The article linked above focuses mostly on customizing with a plugin since a number of you are already using a child theme (City Guide, Locations, etc). By placing custom code inside a plugin we eliminate the danger of losing our modifications after updating the theme to the latest version.Read More »

Last week we published a blog post which outlined plans to retire the newly released Real Estate Directory theme and instead provide a Directory add-on with the same functionality. Well, we didn’t want to keep you waiting for too long… the Real Estate add-on is now available!

Create an ideal real estate portal using this add-on which includes property listing, custom property search and filters, unique property submission form and much, much more.

Soon after Real Estate Directory theme was released in July some of the customers provided constructive feedback and mentioned the added confusion and complexity it would bring in for customers to maintain separate parent themes and at the same time, making Real Estate + Directory theme features on the same site harder to achieve.

We had a team discussion on this and agreed on what our customers said. So, after a lot of back-and-forth discussions we decided to pull the plug, take back the real estate directory theme and make it available as Directory add-on instead.

Why?

The main reason why RE Directory was released as a parent theme (instead of as a child) was to allow us to create child themes specific to that parent theme. Another important reason was easier setup. Installing just RE Directory is definitely faster compared to Directory + RE plugin + child theme.

But after customer feedback, we realize that the tradeoff isn’t worth it. We were committing to supporting a totally new parent theme, one that would make things harder for people going forward.

In the end we have decided to stick with our original plan for Directory, and stay focused on just one parent theme and make it possible to have extended modules like Real Estate to work on the same site, just like our events add-on.Read More »

The 1.1.8 Directory update we released on Tuesday contained a bit more than “just” RTL language compatibility. In that update we also provided compatibility with the Infinite Scroll plugin. The plugin is totally free and can be downloaded from the plugins directory. Along with infinite scrolling, we’re also releasing two new Directory add-ons!

Allow authors to moderate comments with the Reviews Manager add-on

Do you want to give your listing owners the ability to manage reviews on their own listings? Well, with the Reviews Manager now you can finally do that. Once a review is submitted on one of their listings, the listing owner will get an instant email notification. He/she can then either approve or delete the comment directly from the detail page of that listing. A link to this page will also be provided in the email.

The best part about Reviews Manager is the fact it integrates with price packages. This allow you to use the front-end reviews management functionality as leverage for more expensive price packages. Those who want the feature will likely be prepared to pay extra for it. Another cool thing inside Reviews Manager is the new “Comment Settings” tab within the user dashboard page. Using that tab each owner can manage their own comment moderation settings.Read More »

With Real Estate Directory (released about two weeks ago) we introduced our first theme with RTL compatibility. In other words, for the first time ever you can easily use languages like Arabic or Hebrew inside a Templatic theme. With this latest update RTL support is coming to Directory!Read More »